Competition Analysis

Competition Analysis is essential part of marketing strategy. Competitive analysis and strategic management is an assessment of the weaknesses and strength of existing and potential competitors. It provides both, a defensive and an offensive strategic context to identify opportunities and threats. In order to spy on your competitors, first you need to identify who are your competitors are. You may have some in your mind but there may be some more which you don’t even know. The easiest method of identifying competitors is to take help of internet and search for what you do and where you do.

For example, TheSEOGuy is a platform for Digital Marketing services in Delhi NCR. So, I would search for “Digital marketing services in Delhi NCR”, “Best Digital marketing services” or “Digital Marketing company near me”. By this search I could identify who is doing similar business. Also, the location of competitors. I can easily do a quick scan on their web. I could make a spreadsheet of excel file to maintain the record of competitors.

Once the list is prepared, now we could proceed with next step. The next step is to buy their services, register for services or apply for demo. In case of low-cost services, it is recommended to buy services from your competitors else you could apply as a potential customer and inquire about their services so that you could have 10-15 or maybe more proposals of services with you. That’s how I could analyse each and every proposal and match with my services and improve my services.

Spy on their social profiles

Next step is to spy on their social media profiles and understand what kind of content they are using it in order to promote their services or products. That’s how you could stay one step ahead of them. Analyse their social medial advertisements and keep a track on every promotional landing page.

Pro Tip: While analyzing social media content, write down all the URL’s in content. Every landing page is different and if the competitors are using any URL, they are trying to boost specific content. It will be easier for you to create a counter strategy for your social media campaigns. Keep the competition analysis on for minimum 30 days so that you could understand the strategy better. You can either advertise on that area and develop a counter marketing strategy for your brand, service or products.

Spy on Twitter

Twitter is very useful and powerful digital platform where you could drive great engagement for your product or services. You can also use it as one of your contact points as part of customer service and communications. Also, twitter is most powerful tool for managing ORM (Online Reputation Management) for your brand.

In order to spy your competitors on twitter, you could simply use the feature “Lists” and get information of your competitors. Lists are basically the folders which you could create on twitter to keep information according to your need. You could have multiple lists which you could categorized according to you. You could follow the instructions below to create a list.

1. Go to Twitter
2. Click on lists from left hand side menu
3. Click on Create new list
4. Name your list
5. Add a description
6. Check Make Private option so that only you could see it and your competitors would not be notified about your list
7. Add your direct/indirect competitors in the list

Pro tip: Conduct a monthly analysis on your list to see what your competitors are doing and what offers they are putting on social media. You could easily understand the strategy and stay one step ahead of them.

Spy on Linkedin

For B2B business category, linkedin is one of the finest platforms for marketers. It is a business-oriented platform where you could get genuine lead for your business. The best part about this platform is, you can spy on your competitor company along with profiles related to your business. You can spy on Managing Directors, Trainers, Marketing consultants and every possible individual which either are your competitors or working for competitor company.

But the challenge is, you have to do it quietly so that they will not get any notification of your activities. It’s because linkedin is a platform where people get notified when someone view their profile. This is not a good idea to do it because your competitors would know that you are spying on them. Let’s follow the steps perform a competition analysis on linkedin without notifying your competitors.

1. Login to Linkedin
2. Go to profiles
3. Click on Settings and Privacy
4. Choose the option “Visibility”.
5. Select “Private Mode”.

Once you are done with the changes, your profile will became private. You can search for any user or account on linkedin and they will not see your name under “Who viewed your account” notification. This is how you could stalk on linkedin profiles.

You could get back to normal privacy settings once you are done with stalking your competitors or continue with private mode.

There are multiple tools available such as SEMRush, SpyFu, MOZ, ahref and Wordstream which could help you in spying on website performance and traffic. All you need to do is, sign-up on these platforms and conduct a search on competitors. You could get detailed information about competition web traffic.

FAQs – How to Spy on Competitors

Pro Tip: While conducting Competition Analysis, make sure to write down every piece of information you collect. It will help you to identify key points and make better Strategy for your business.

Hope these Competition-Analysis tips would help you to identify your true competitors and create a strong digital marketing strategy for your business. If you have any feedback or suggestions for this information, then do comment below.

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